Absolute Powers: Notes on Michael Jackson

In the days since Michael Jackson died, it’s become a cliché to complain about the “orgy” of media coverage. Isn’t it ridiculous, we hear, that a celebrity’s death should knock Iran and the economy off the newscasts? Well, yeah, of course. And Farrah didn’t get her due, either.

But what isn’t ridiculous is that millions of us would find Jackson’s saga compelling. For starters, he wasn’t a mere “celebrity”—you know, a talentless contestant on some mingy reality show. He was a gifted artist who was, at different points, the best-known entertainer in the history of the world and maybe the biggest punch line.

Although his story has now curdled into the usual postmortem sleaze, his saga remains fascinating in all its kinks and whorls. Like so many things that people accuse the media of overplaying—the O. J. Simpson murder case, say, or Bill and Monica—the King of Pop’s life and death is, in fact, an incredibly juicy story that taps into deep wellsprings of our national culture.   

The Lost Boys

You hardly need to be Freud (or even Dr. Phil) to realize that Jackson—who was obsessed with Peter Pan and attracted, in some unsavory form, to kids—was clearly living out some delirious fantasy of childhood. But exactly what fantasy was he pursuing out there at Neverland Ranch? The obvious answer is that he hoped to create some imaginary ideal (taken from TV? old movies? his servants’ reminiscences?) of the normal, innocent boyhood that he never had.

If that wasn’t crazy-making enough, he also tried, at the very same time, to relive the abnormal boyhood that he actually did have. He was a cute eleven-year-old boy when he first got accustomed to the public’s affection, and he was traumatized when the world seemed to love him less once he became a wide-nosed teenager with acne. Jackson tried to regain his lost cuteness with trips to the plastic surgeon and a deliberately childish affect. He wanted the Man in the Mirror to be the Boy in the Mirror.

In this, he was the reductio ad absurdum of our youth-obsessed culture.

Although Jackson clearly took things to freakish extremes, his fixation on not growing up is quite routine—just think of movies like The Hangover—and his ardent desire to recapture the moment he first made it is routine in showbiz, where stardom seems to hit people like magic. Because they’re never really sure how or why it happened, they often fixate on some quality they associate with the moment they became stars. They go back to it again and again.

This was surely true of Jackson, who spent nearly all his adult years living out a tragic misunderstanding of his own popularity. Desperate for love (and completely missing the point of Peter Pan, which is about the inevitability of having to grow up), he kept thinking the world would adore him for his ersatz boyishness when what it admired was his genuine talent.

Body of Lies

Over the years, writers knocked themselves out trying to describe the bottomless weirdness of Jackson’s ever-changing features—“a trembling skin-graft mask cursed with eternal youth,” et cetera. You could hardly fault their purple prose. Nothing about his story, not even the pedophilia talk, was stranger than watching the pretty young man on the cover of Thriller turn himself into what looked eerily like his own ghost.

That said, Jackson was hardly alone in such a physical transformation. One of the defining features of American celebrity madness is how often it inscribes itself on the body. He simply joined the line of train-wreck stars—fat Elvis, skin-and-bones Karen Carpenter, ballooning Anna Nicole, tattoo-mad Mike Tyson, polyethylene-faced Mickey Rourke—whose appearance became an emblem of inner chaos.

Of course, not everyone does this the same way. Such great fifties sex symbols as Elvis, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor became notorious for eventually burying their beauty beneath pounds and pounds of flesh, as if trying to hide the very thing that made them attractive. Consciously or not, they were running away from their fame. In contrast, Jackson was running toward something—an idea of good looks somewhere in his head. Sadly, even more than those actresses who wind up with dire plastic-surgery jobs (you know who they are), he made himself into someone who grew more disturbing each time you saw him. He never learned what Madonna always knew: You can change your body—a little bit, anyway—but the smart thing is to change your image. 

Ebony and Ivory

Jackson was the great superstar of what archaeologists will someday dub the Music Video Era. What made him truly transcendent was his dancing—sliding around those glowing squares on the “Billie Jean” video, topping his dazzling Motown 25 performance with the jaw-dropping moonwalk. Not only were his moves amazing but unlike nearly all other video stars, he could do everything live. 

Michael’s dancing gave him enormous credibility on the urban streets, where being a good dancer is akin to being a good fighter—it’s a form of machismo, a way of commanding universal respect. (He was always a competitive guy.) And thanks to MTV, his dancing helped make him a crossover star, praised by no less than Fred Astaire and emulated by millions of suburban kids who worked on copying Michael’s signature arm thrust and crotch-grab (even if they’d never do the latter in public). Where an astonishing performer like James Brown took pride in dancing himself into a funky lather, Michael’s whole vibe was drier, smoother, less threatening to white people. Exuding the ease you might expect from someone dubbed the King of Pop, he had a sweetness that finally let black music become acknowledged as part of the American mainstream.  

And because popular culture is the way we work out social ideas in America, he helped do the same for blackness itself. Jackson was born, fittingly enough, in Gary, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago. Whether it’s mere coincidence or a revealing by-product of its troubled racial history, the Windy City has been the launching pad for the most important crossover figures of the last quarter century—Jackson, Oprah, Michael Jordan, and of course, Barack Obama. As a group, they’ve changed America.

In fact, it isn’t off the wall to think that many of the voters who went for Obama in the last election did so in part because of the way Michael Jackson changed our pop culture. They grew up thinking something that previous generations did not—that an African-American man was the biggest and most talented star in the world. So why not the most powerful?